Tag Archives: Cranberries

For February’s Secret Recipe Club, I was paired with Lynsey of Lynsey Lou’s. Lynsey is a natural in the kitchen – she learned to cook with her family as a child and continues to spend lots of time trying new recipes! I am so impressed with her beautiful photos and how many recipes she has – I wish I had her level of dedication and inspiration!

I ended up choosing her Brussel Sprout Slaw. It’s a bit of a Christmas-y dish, but I knew I couldn’t pass it up. It didn’t disappoint!

I had to make a few changes as finding pomegranets at this time of year is equivalent to finding the holy grail and I can’t eat Greek yoghurt. I made 2/3 of her recipe, but only made half the sauce as I’m not a soggy salad person. I used vegan mayo, and olive oil instead of vegetable and we ended up adding bacon (not pictured) as what salad isn’t made better with bacon?

A few days after Christmas, I got the flu, which then morphed into viral bronchitis (fun, eh?), so I haven’t spent that much time making anything other than tea and chicken soup. However, I was really itching to bake something before I go back to work, so I thought: “why not make something that is full of cold-fighting ingredients, so it doesn’t make me feel worse?” (Any excuse works when it comes to me justifying my desire to bake!) Things like:

Honey – can soothe sore throats, is full of antioxidants and is anti-bacterial (source)

Since sugar is known to not help your immune system, I wanted to reduce the amount used and use honey instead for its illness fighting properties. I did include a small amount of unrefined granulated sugar as I know that cakes get part of their fine crumb from granulated sugar. Plus, I’ve never really baked with honey so I didn’t want to stray too much from the original recipe.

The cake turned out quite well – it wasn’t overly sweet, the cranberries and orange flavour played off each other wonderfully, the cranberries were sufficiently goopy and delicious (look at the edge of the cake – upside down cakes can’t get better than that!) and the cake texture is moist and delicate. It wasn’t overly ginger-y, so if you like ginger, please feel free to add more!

I’m pretty sure that you can make this recipe to be egg free easily – either add two egg replacers or increase the xanthan gum to 1 tsp, add an extra tsp. of baking powder and increase liquid by ~ 4tbsp or until your batter reaches the desired consistency. If you try this, please let me know!